Smutty songs and the respectable ear

Jamaica's rural folk music and its first commercially recorded popular form — banjo, guitar, hand drum and the rumba box supplying the bass, with lyrics that ran to social comment, innuendo and topical wit. Mento was being recorded from the early 1950s, notably at Stanley Motta's studio, and was often sold abroad under the "calypso" label. Everything that followed grew from it, and its rhythmic and lyrical habits persist right through ska, reggae and dancehall.

One of the mento singers who recorded through the 1950s, in the wave of Jamaican records made just before ska. His songs work the way mento does — topical, funny and pointed about hard circumstances — and belong to the period when Jamaica was recording its own music commercially for the first time.

Professor Carolyn Cooper is a Jamaican literary and cultural-studies scholar whose work reclaimed Jamaican popular culture, orality and "slackness" from dismissal as vulgar and reframed dancehall as a legitimate object of scholarship — work that has led her to be described as the "queen of dancehall and reggae studies." Born 20 November 1950 in Kingston and raised in a Seventh-day Adventist household, she attended St Hugh's High School and won the Jamaica Scholarship (Girls) in 1968. She holds a BA in English (1971) from The University of the West Indies, Mona, and an MA and PhD (1977) in English from the University of Toronto, where she studied on a Canadian International Development Agency fellowship. After teaching at Atlantic Union College in Massachusetts (1975-1980), Cooper joined the Department of Literatures in English at UWI Mona in 1980, rising from Lecturer to Professor over 37 years there before retiring in 2017. She was Campus Coordinator of the Women's Studies Working Group (1982-1992), Head of the Department of Literatures in English (2000-2003), and Director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies (2005-2008). In 1994 she established the Reggae Studies Unit at UWI Mona and led it for more than a decade, and in 1997 she founded the annual Bob Marley Lecture. Her first major book, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the "Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, argued that Jamaican popular forms long dismissed as crude — dancehall lyrics, proverbs, Anansi stories — carry serious cultural and political meaning. Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) extended this reading to the sound-clash arena and dancehall's global reach. She co-edited Bob Marley: The Man and His Music (2003) with Eleanor Wint, and edited the collection Global Reggae (2012). Beyond the university, Cooper was a long-running weekly columnist for the Sunday Gleaner and co-hosted broadcast programmes including Man and Woman Story on the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, Question Time on CVM Television and Big People Sup'm on PBC Jamaica. In August 2013 she was made a Commander of the Order of Distinction for outstanding contribution to education. Also known as Carolyn Joy Cooper.

The mento tradition of bawdy, thinly veiled sexual word-play, heard in widely cited recordings such as "Rough Rider" and "Water the Garden" and prized by rural audiences for its comic innuendo while respectable society dismissed it as "smutty.".

Mento star of the 1950s calypso boom: singer and guitarist Norman Thomas, who took a Jamaican band to American clubs and television and recorded for Capitol when the US market wanted "calypso" — much of it actually mento. He died young in 1959, at the height of the craze.

Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley (7 September 1919 - 26 July 2006), known universally as Miss Lou, was the writer who made Jamaican Patois a language you could publish in, broadcast in and be taken seriously in. She studied Jamaican folklore at Friends College in Highgate, and in 1945 became the first Black student admitted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London on a British Council scholarship — then spent six decades using that training on material the colonial curriculum had treated as beneath notice. Her collections run from Anancy Stories and Poems in Dialect (1944) through Jamaica Labrish (1966) to Auntie Roachy Seh (1993). She presented Miss Lou's Views on radio from 1965 and the children's programme Ring Ding on television from 1970 to 1982, on the conviction that children should be taught their own heritage; a generation grew up inside it. She was made MBE in 1960, received the Order of Jamaica in 1974, the Musgrave Medal in 1978 and the Order of Merit in 2001. The line from her to Mutabaruka, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Yasus Afari is direct and acknowledged, and every deejay who ever chatted in Patois over a rhythm works in ground she cleared first. She died in Toronto.

Max Romeo is a Jamaican singer whose "Sipple Out Deh", released in the UK as "War inna Babylon" and produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry, is a landmark of mid-1970s political reggae: its title, Jamaican patois for slippery or dangerous, set the tone for protest songs on government corruption, ghetto gun violence and police heavy-handedness. He followed it with the directly anti-government "No Joshua No" and "One Step Forward". Despite the "War inna Babylon" album's critical standing, Romeo has said he was paid only 2,500 Jamaican dollars for it. Romeo wrote it himself, and it was turned down for recording by John Holt, Derrick Morgan, Roy Shirley and Slim Smith before producer Bunny Lee persuaded Romeo to voice it himself; it became a UK pop hit despite the BBC's broadcast ban.

Public record: Max Romeo's 1969 single 'Wet Dream', an early example of reggae 'slackness', was refused airplay by the BBC in the United Kingdom over its sexually suggestive lyrics, yet the record still reached the UK singles Top 10 (Wikipedia; NationalWorld obituary coverage).

The recurring middle-class "respectability" framework through which colonial and post-colonial Jamaican elites judged popular music, from mento's bawdiness and Rastafari drumming to rude-boy records, as vulgar or dangerous, and against which working-class forms were defended as authentic culture.

The 1950s hotel-and-tourist performance economy in which Jamaican mento was packaged, often as "calypso," for visitor audiences, a commercial framing some saw as diluting the rural folk form and others as an honest livelihood and showcase.